Breakfast Table, and the taxation of ground values, if of adding a special penny or so or so to Schedule A of the if only by the simple expedient Tax, was surely not too much to expect from the future leader of the Liberal party.* allt sv 153 Above all, he might have encouraged and facilitated the departmental reforms set on foot by Mr. Acland, Mr. Asquith, and Mr. Mundella, instead of sm Snubbing them, and publicly declaring his continued allegiance to the old Whig ideal of reducing the functions of Government to the keeping of a ring for Capital and Labor to fight in, f. 10 - egy dog lliv 11: Here we a formidable list of omissions, which cannot be put down to the loquacity of Messrs. Bowles and Bartley, or the obstructive wiles of Mr. Chamberlain. Had the will existed, there would have been no difficulty about the way, as was shown by Mr. Acland, when he insisted on the payment of trade union wages to his South Kensington mechanics. It is, by the way, significant of the whole feeling of the Liberal leaders that in recommending the Liberal party, as their custom is, to the gratitude of the country, they have never alluded to this action of Mr. Acland's. They are probably ashamed of it; and they will certainly have no other feeling concerning their failure to follow his example than one of selfcongratulation on having escaped the appalling violations of Manchester principles suggested in our lists of might have dones.” ››

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Eminent Counsel for the Defence.

To this indictment of the Liberal ministers as employers of fabor, the defence offered by the Government was a speech made by Sir Charles Russell to the London Liberal and Radical Union, in which, after pleading that the War Office had tried to prevent sweating under its contracts, he laid great stress on the fact that the Admiralty had raised wages.

This is no answer to the Fabian charges, but virtually an admission of their unanswerableness. The Fortnightly article not only stated that the Government had raised wages at the Admiralty, but went on to do what Sir Charles did not dare→→ that is, to give in plain figures the scandalously inadequate sums to which the wages of the unfortunate employees of the Government had been raised. We will now clinch the matter by the following exact particulars and references.

On the 6th March, 1893 (see Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, vol. 9, page 1,127, &c.), Mr. Campbell-Bannerman, speaking in the name of the Government in the House of Commons, said :"When we say we agree to the proposition contained in the amendment, we mean that the Government should show themselves to be among the best employers

* It is an open secret-Sir William has indeed boasted of it-that the draft Budget which represented the utmost that he could have brought himself to lay before the House of Commons, even if Mr. Gladstone had allowed him to take time for it, contained neither of these reforms, and was confined to the one proposal of making the freeholder pay as heavy a Death Duty as the leaseholder. [The defence of the Government which appeared in the Contemporary Review for December, 1893, contains the following startling contradiction of this footnote: If Sir William Harcourt had been permitted, he would have introduced, instead of an act of vulgar oppression of the poorer taxpayer, an equalisation of the death duties, steeply graduated against the larger estates; and he would also have provided for payment of members. The veto on the project unquestionably came from Mr. Gladstone, and was urged partly on a constitutional plea, partly on the ground of want of time." If the Contemporary writer is well informed, then the Government, instead of improving a bad budget, deliberately spoiled a good one; and the offender was not the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but the Prime Minister himself.]

† See his Budget Speech, 2nd April, 1893.

+ Speech in the House of Commons, 31st July, 1893

of labor in the country; that they should, if I may use the expression, be in the first flight of employers. I accept in the fullest sense the principle that the terms of Government employment should be beyond reproach. have ceased to believe in what are known as competition or starvation wages."

We

This was the promise. Now for the performance. From the House of Commons return, No. 386, dated the 23rd August, 1893, we learn the following facts as to the Navy Establishment. The "established" unskilled laborers are to get eighteen shillings a week, with a shilling extra at Deptford and Woolwich.

The "hired" unskilled laborers are to get seventeen shillings the first year, eighteen the next, standard rate nineteen shillings, with a shilling extra at Deptford and Woolwich. Skilled laborers hired are to get twenty shillings for the first year, rising by a shilling at a time to a maximum of twenty-seven shillings. Bricklayers and masons are to get twenty-eight shillings a week if "established," and thirty-one if "hired."

It is hardly necessary to remind those who worked to establish the London County Council's minimum of twenty-four shillings a week and an eight-hour day for unskilled labour, that a "standard rate" of nineteen shillings (classed by Mr. Charles Booth as a "chronic poverty" wage), accompanied by a refusal of the eighthour day, is not a satisfactory fulfilment of the promise to place the Government "in the first flight of employers."*

What the Government's own Supporters Admit.

By far the ablest reply to the Fabian Manifesto that has yet appeared is the article, already quoted (see note, page 9), from the Contemporary Review, December, 1893. The author, Mr. H. W. Massingham, has set forth every scrap of administrative reform that can be placed to the credit of the Government. We shall give a list of these later on. Meanwhile, here is Mr. Massingham's own summing-up of his case on behalf of the Government :

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"But here arises the one vital question of policy with which the Fabian Manifesto, occupied mainly with the ingenious manipulation of facts to serve an obvious end, does not deal. On what principle are the wages of State employees to be regulated? Are we to follow the language of Sir John Gorst's resolution, and afford an example to private employers throughout the country, or, in Mr. CampbellBannerman's exegesis, is the Government to be " among the best employers in the country," and to take rank "in the first flight" of employers? Or are we to go a step further, and to use the whole moral force of the Government, in its capacity of employer, as a lever to heighten the living wage and raise the standard of remuneration for the entire body of unskilled and skilled labour? I think there can be no doubt that it would pay a state organised on democratic lines to give its workers 10 per cent. above the level of the best kind of private employment.

It may be well to mention here that Sir Charles Russell's speech to the London Liberal and Radical Union was delivered on the 6th November, and was immediately claimed by the Gladstonian papers as a splendid record of good work actually accomplished in the interests of Liberalism and a humiliating refutationf the Fabian Manifesto. The meeting, however, was adjourned to the 13th. on which date Sir Charles Russell abruptly resigned his chairmanship of the Liberal and Radical Union, confessing that his position as a member of Mr. Gladstone's Government was incompatible with the presidency of the London Radicals. Nothing has since been heard from the admirers of Sir Charles's defence.

The Government, however, have set themselves a much more moderate level of achievement, and I think there can be no doubt whatever that they have not achieved it. The only sound interpretation of a model employer is a man who pays trade-union rates of wages, observes the trade-union limit of hours, and deals with "fair," as opposed to "unfair," houses. Apply all these tests, and the Government unquestionably breaks down on every one of them. The eight-hours day, or forty-eight-hours week, has not been accepted by the Admiralty, and, according to Mr. Robertson, it has no immediate chance of being adopted. The standard rates of wages have not been proclaimed in the case of the coopers and ship-wrights; and the result is that the £30,000 odd which has been added to the Admiralty wages-list, as the result of a careful but still inadequate revision, stands for no clear principle, and does not represent the moral leverage of which the industrial reformer stands in need.*

Still clearer is the case for the eight-hours day. The results of the experiments in the cartridge factory at Woolwich coincide with those which the great majority of private adherents of the eight-hours day have put on record. There has been no reduction, but rather an increase, of output, and there has been a perceptible increase of efficiency. If the Government, therefore, are to rank in Mr. CampbellBannerman's "first flight" of employers, the least they can do is to follow the example of Liberal capitalists like Mr. Mather, Mr. Brunner, Mr. Beaufoy, Mr. Keith, and Mr. William Allan. Against these shining records we have still to place such absolutely indefensible tyranny as that involved in the treatment of the Thames water guards, whose tale of twenty-four hours' work is now and then extended to forty hours; we have the fact that the Treasury has discouraged the process of turning the Queen's Government into a "fair house"; that the Stationary Office has done nothing; that the sub-contractor has not been abolished; that fifty-four hours a week are worked in many Government factories where the forty-eight hours rule could very well be substituted; and that large printing jobs are given to the non-unionist houses which have been properly barred out of the contract for the Labour Gazette."

The Contemporary goes on to complain of" something very like betrayal" of the people by the Government on the Budget; but we have no space for further quotations. The above sample will suffice to shew that the supporters of the Government have actually added to our charges against the Cabinet in the very act of defending it against us.

The Government's Legislative Record.

The Fortnightly article, having shewn the sort of employers Liberal ministers are, proceeded to deal with them as legislators, as follows:

WATERING DOWN THEIR PROMISES.

"Let us now pass from the administrative disappointments to the legislative ones and from the trade-union point of view to that of the middle-class electorate, And here the ardent Gladstonian will, no doubt, begin to breathe again, feeling that in the department his defence of Tory obstruction' and want of time is ready and efficient. We need not meet this by pointing out that there has been no want of time, but only a monstrous waste of time by a government so conservative that it will face a storm of obloquy for gagging' and 'guillotining' rather than make these measures unnecessary by bringing the standing orders of the House of Commons up to date, and making an end of its insufferable

The inferiority of the Government's scale of wages. as compared with that prevailing on the London County Council, is decisively shown by a comparison of the sums paid to park and open spaces' employees. Thus a Government inspector gets 6 to 14 per cent. less wages with more hours' work than a County Council inspector; park constables get 10 per cent. less; park foremen 23 per cent. less; propagators 7 to 12 per cent. less; garden labourers 25 per cent. less and longer hours; men in greenhouses 16 per cent. less. [Mr. Massingham's own note.]

exhibitions of speechmaking and of those silly traditions of the best club in London' which the country has now far outgrown. We can substantiate our case without resorting to that argument, because the delays of the Opposition, though they may have retarded legislation, have not prevented this most maladroit of Governments from boasting of what it would do if it only had time. It has thus announced beforehand that it is going-when it has timeto offer its political creditors a penny in the pound in settlement of its Newcastle liabilities. The great Reform Bill, which was to include not only One Man One Vote, but payment of the returning officers' expenses and payment of members, as ' necessary parts of the Liberal programme,' and 'the only means of securing an adequate representation of labor in the House of Commons,' now turns out to be a Bill for shortening the registration period to three months, and nothing else, not even remedying the exclusion of lodgers from the County Council franchise. Comment on this must be either uncivil or inadequate : let it suffice to congratulate the Conservatives on the impossibility of under bidding their opponents in this direction. Next we come to Home Ruie for London,' the promised Act for cutting at the monstrous monopoly by which the ground landlords of that great city, which we now know by Mr. Booth's terrible poverty maps,' as we never knew it before, take annually over £16,000,000 absolutely for the use of the bare ground. This august metropolitan charter has now dwindled to a petty measure for a small further equalisation of the London rates. As it will not cost the ground landlords one farthing, nor relieve any ratepayer except at the expense of another, it may be taken as the most carefully conservative instalment of reform that even a Whig Government could decently propose. The one advantage of its inadequacy is, that no one has professed any great concern for its fate since the Government deliberately refused to secure it a second reading (which was quite feasible), and condemned it to the indefinite postponement of a future session. If the London ratepayer goes to the poll at the general election with undiminished burdens, he owes this fate in the main to the active hostility of Sir William Harcourt, and the weak complaisance of the President of the Local Government Board.

THE BUDGET.

"It must be confessed that the shock of this double disappointment had been largely broken by the Budget, which served as an indirect but unmistakeable announcement that the Newcastle programme had been taken up merely to catch votes, and that the Cabinet, as a whole, had neither a touch of its spirit in them nor any intention of even pretending to act up to the letter of it. The Budget was really a masterstroke of disillusion. It was eagerly looked forward to for the redemption of the three great vote-compelling promises of the Government. First, the free breakfast table' with its cheapened tea, coffee, chicory, cocoa, currants, raisins, prunes, &c. &c. Next, the shifting of at least the final straws of our fiscal burdens from the struggling tradesman to the receivers of the £500,000,000 of our national income which goes to those to whom Mr. Chamberlain applied the saying 'they toil not; neither do they spin,' or, as Prince Bismarck put it, who have only to clip coupons with a pair of scissors, or write rent receipts.' The Liberals, though not bound by the observations of Mr. Chamberlain or Prince Bismarck, are responsible to the ratepayers for the hopes founded on Mr. Morley's speech at the Eighty Club in November, 1889, and Mr. Gladstone's oration at the Memorial Hall on the 29th July, 1887, with its significant allusion to your magnificent Embankment, made, not as it should "have been, at the expense of the permanent proprietary interests, but charged, every shilling of it, upon occupants: that is to say, mainly, either upon the wages "of laboring man in full, necessary for his family, or upon the trade and industry, "and enterprise which belong of necessity to a vast metropolis like this." Finally, there was the question of questions, payment of members,' provision for which in the Budget was, as the Radicals showed unanswerably, perfectly feasible. A majority of the Cabinet stood pledged to this reform; and Mr. Gladstone's letter already quoted was either a promise of payment of members or a deliberate equivocation.

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Probably there never was a Budget from which the Radicals expected so much as from this first one after the triumph of the Newcastle programme. The

moment of parturition came amid breathless expectation; and the papers next morning announced that Sir William Harcourt had been delivered of an extra penny on the Income Tax. Nothing else absolutely nothing but an extra penny all round, undifferentiated between the idler and worker; ungraduated between the millionaire and small tradesman The Fabian Society can only ask the public, with sardonic satisfaction at the complete fulfilment of its own prophecies, whether anything is likely to save a party hampered by such a Chancellor of the Exchequer. Can the most thoroughgoing Liberal partisan keep his countenance whilst pretending that even if a miraculous conversion of the Opposition to Home Rule gives the Government unlimited time and unlimited opportunity, the Gladstonian Radicals will be allowed to take one step forward except under the most ignominious compulsion from their infuriated dupes of the Newcastle program???

29 dan it 1: >The Parish Councils Bill.

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A word now as to the Parish Councils Bill. In our desire to give the more progressive members of the Cabinet their due, we did not say a word in disparagement of the Employers' Liability Bill or the Parish Councils Bill. Whilst the Liberal Press was still unblushingly trying to persuade the country that we had ignored both Bills, the Gladstonians were very unpleasantly taken aback by a letter in the Westminster Gazette (6th Nov., 1893) from the Rev. W. Tuckwell," the Radical parson," a tried supporter of the Liberal party. What had he to say of the Bill which we had spoken smoothly of as "the great success of the session," and "the most serious attempt yet proposed to provide the agricultural laborer with a means of escape from his dreary serfdom"? We have not space for his whole letter; but here is his summing up:— "Other defects in the Bill might be condoned if the allotment clauses were satisfactory; unless amended in Committee they are a mockery of all our promises, showing little or no improvement upon the worthless Allotment Acts of the late Government. In its present form the laborers will look upon the Bill as a betrayal. They will not vote Tory; for Toryism is to them synonymous with oppression; but they will stay away from the polls-and they will be wise."

This time there was no attempt at denial. Without pretending to defend his own Bill, Mr. Fowler gave notice of his intention to amend it to Mr. Tuckwell's order by a clause empowering Parish Councils to hire land for allotments compulsorily. le in den for allotments

Every possible effort has been made by the supporters of Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet to convict the Fabian Society of injustice and misrepresentation in the above criticisms of the Government's legislative and financial record. These efforts were summed up in an article by Mr. Michael Davitt in the Nineteenth Century for December 1893, entitled "Fabian Fustian," and in Mr. din Mr. Massingham's The Government and Labor" in the Contemporary Review of the same date. We shall now give a complete list of the reforms, administrative and legislative, claimed as having been carried out by the Government and omitted from the Fabian article. First, however, in order that these reforms may be compared with those promised in the Newcastle Program, we reproduce verbatim et literatim the version of that document issued by the Liberal party at the last General Election. w mod touhuff & enw 19797 919. it glimic. I' emmaryng oben)#9% vrt to agad sit isits 9no taut dixit aront